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OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-than-lukewarm-rejection-i-guess dept.

Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."

2 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another infomation-free summary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The guy logged in using credentials 'borrowed' from an authorised beta tester, from more than twice the recommended distance from the server, acknowledged multiple high latency (due to distance) notifications, and the best he could do is damn the service with faint praise.

    1. Re:Yet another infomation-free summary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      ". After all, playing on the internet isn't as quick as a "LAN frag fest", and yet the vast majority of gamers, even of twitch-heavy games, are playing on the internet, not on LANs."

      With tons of client side prediction and faking trying very very hard to hide the client-server lag.

      With OnLive, you can't do that - it just sends some inputs and gets some video back.

      I mean, this could work under optimal, super fast network connections, but I'm pretty sure ensuring you have such a connection would be so expensive that this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist - it is always cheaper to spend the money on client side hardware instead. I'm sure stupid venture capitalists will keep pumping money into this with idiotic projections how bazillion people will pay X dollars per month or hour or whatever that will somehow cover those network infrastructure costs.

      I doubt it will and few years from now OnLive goes bust taking a big pile of money with it, but hey, you never know... can't do impossible stuff without trying.